Here’s my beautiful unemployed-for-too-long-have-no-money-dont-care-about-looks lab :)

picture of a raspberrypi, switch, HP elite desk, KVM and mess of cables on a desk

Hey it’s more than good enough to run all this ¯_(ツ)_/¯

screenshot showing list of hosted apps and resources usage of servers

  • Unusable 3151 ⁂@lemmy.mlEnglish
    97·
    5 days ago

    people put too much “lab” and not enough “home” in homelab. we need more dust, more cables, more jank. love this.

    • BakedCatboy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      30·
      5 days ago

      Dust and jank you say? Behold, my old basement homelab when I rented just outside Boston with a very permissive landlord who agreed to let me have Comcast gig pro fiber pulled into the basement, running off an outlet I installed without asking on a free slot in our breaker box. The dust was terrible, the rack was a hodge podge, I had to put up that sign because maintenance guys kept plugging their power tools into the UPS when I wasn’t around and tripping it. But Comcast fucked up the billing and the 2gig + 1gig symmetric internet is still active to this day for free, which I left behind minimally working for the next tenants after parting out the rack. The tower by the side was a friend who wanted to colocate on my fiber, and I had some fun stuff like a slide out vga console. I also pulled Ethernet into every room, most of them installed with nice wall plates all bundled down to the rack, so with a house full of gamers, you could have multiple people pulling a gig on a game download without anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes.

    • tourist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I’d be sharing the physical manifestations of my various mental illnesses

      unorganized extension cords running across the floor

      machines that have been unplugged for months

      empty energy drink cans all over the place

      excess ethernet cable length occupying a sizeable chunk of the floor

      router mounted to a plastic wall hook because I don’t have a drill

      credible fire hazards

      cable anti-management

      I can’t get that all in a few photos, even if I wanted to

      besides, I’m going to clean it up

      eventually, one day

      when I get to it

  • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    13·
    3 days ago

    Still busy building it. Have a few more parts to print, like the back trim and plug holder, and I need to remove the protective plastic from the aluminum sheets.

      • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Thanks! I made it from some scrap pieces of wood from my IKEA headboard, aluminium extrusions and some aluminium sheets, then just 3D printed trim and fittings.

        I was lucky and got a good deal on some ram, so each has 24gb.

        Its supposed to be my kubernetes homelab. My actual server is hidden in the electrical box in my apartment.

  • craigers@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    4 days ago

    ✅ Rackmounted

    ❌ Professional

    What front end are using for your apps? Looks nice.

    • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Hey it’s my desktop! Love that case. Horizontal motherboards make more sense with how big graphics cards have gotten.

  • sunbeam60@feddit.ukEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    Behold the Splendor!

    • TerraMaster 4 bay - 30 TB usable and hosts all my services
    • China special N100 - runs OPNsense
    • gobox to provide a SIP DECT bridge; wife wants a landline. I don’t get it either.
    • ZBT-2 ZigBee antenna for garage alarm and handling a bunch of IKEA lights.
    • a Hive heating controller (UK “smart” heating system).
    • A switch with two ports that can be bonded.
    • All sitting on a custom-built shelf with lots of ventilation and cabling routing holes.
  • UnfairUtan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    Love this thread, here’s my contribution

    Just a pi4B and some external drives for Linux ISOs

    edit : they resting on a piece of foam to reduce vibrations

    Bonus pic of the zigbee dongle for Home Assistant

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Man, GTFO with that hot mess… I’m jealous really. I’m getting a chub just thinking about it.

    • thumdinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Is this the “before” shot? There’s 190 spare ports. I’m all for leaving room to expand, but that’s a lot

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      I remember looking at Sysracks racks a while back when I was trying to find sound-absorbent enclosed racks (which they do make, though I didn’t get one; wasn’t willing to pay for it, as they come at a very large premium). They were one of the very few companies making them. I don’t think that those particular ones are the sound-absorbent models, but their name stuck in my head.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        I got this because it’s almost fully enclosed. Most of the noise comes from an open rear door which this doesn’t have, and an open front door which this sort of has. It’s not very loud when the hvac is set to a reasonable level, even though it’s pulling air through 4 fans on the top.

        I have additional sound deadening material if I need to apply it but I’m not there yet.

        I’m eyeing 3-5 more 1U servers though so maybe I’ll need to do it.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          I have additional sound deadening material if I need to apply it but I’m not there yet.

          That’s probably a pretty good idea in terms of cost. I checked earlier when I made the comment to see what the price difference these days was, and IIRC a non-isolated 18U is ~$800 and an isolated 18U is ~$1800. They aren’t putting anything like $1k of sound-absorbing material into the rack.

  • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
    31·
    5 days ago

    Projects that im running:

    General Web server out of junk

    Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.
    image

    Solar powered web server on a phone

    Solar powered web server. Its going to be repurposed into a meshtastic node soon.
    Qm4kpb3x0dQ7Qib.jpg

    hRMBBvZMfVgbgIs.jpg

    Ebook reader on a heltek v3

    Somewhat jank setup of a heltek which is also an ebook reader. It runs a webserver to upload the book in txt format, then I can take it on the go. I still have to do some work on the text. J6SwY2qZLUHcGkY.jpg

    • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      5 days ago

      That ebook reader is wild! Does the text stay in place while you read, or does it scroll past like a stock ticker?

      If the latter doesn’t exist, I guess I should go push a PR to make that happen on meshcore firmware haha

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        5 days ago

        Stays in place. It was a weekend project so I still need to do some work on the text in particular. Im not sure if ill go any farther, but the code is here if you want to take a look.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.

      If you get bored and adventurous:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_case_screws

      Computer case screws are the hardware used to secure parts of a PC to the case. Although there are numerous manufacturers of computer cases, they have generally used three thread sizes.

      The #6-32 UNC screws are often found on 3.5" hard disk drives and the case’s body to secure the covers. The M3 threaded holes are often found on 5.25" optical disc drives, 3.5" floppy drives, and 2.5" drives. Motherboards and other circuit boards often use a #6-32 UNC standoff. #4-40 UNC thumb screws are often found on the ends of DVI, VGA, serial and parallel connectors.

      You might be able to get a box of thumbscrews in the appropriate diameter and go toolless. I’ve had a number of computer cases that ship with those (my current desktop case just uses magnets, doesn’t even have the thumbscrews). I have had a lot of less-than-ideal toolless things in the past, including poorly-designed toolless hard drive mounting stuff that wound up being a lot more work than the traditional tool-requiring stuff, but for the screws that keep the case closed, going toolless has always been a big win for me.

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Thats good to know! Although if I am honest, ill probably just repurpose my current desktop that I am using for this conversation and get a new one if I end up re-doing my homeservers again.

        Last thing I want to do is more work at home. So these are just “for fun” projects. If im not having fun, I start removing things from the setup.

  • Alfredolin@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    Here my homelab. I moved not too long ago and I am still lacking some furniture, so it’s on the floor with cables lying wild. Does not look like much but it actually covers almost all my needs. I still need a VPS because of email ports and resident ISP not being compatible…

  • Senal@programming.devEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    a bunch of ebay specials with more ebay parts scavenged over time + some 3d printing.

    The centre tower has a miniitx mb and PSU behind those panels to run the NAS, and the drive bays are in the bottom.

    The right is a failover cluster that isn’t finished yet.

    • Ajen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Wow, that looks really good! I like the labels on each server! Are the 3d printed parts custom or did you find them online?

      • Senal@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        Custom printed.

        The front rack grills, keystone panels and thinkcentre mounts are from a website but all the other printed parts are custom.

      • Senal@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        i’m not utilising it nearly as much as i should which is why i haven’t gotten around to the failover cluster yet.

        • linuxguy@piefed.caEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          Same here wrt utilization. I’ve excess capacity and can’t seem to find anything I want to use it on.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    23·
    5 days ago

    I was too lazy to put on clothes and go out to my shack. This picture is a bit old. It’s missing a lot of mess and my PeerTube server.

    • greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish
      51·
      4 days ago

      It is strange seeing the physical manifestation of a web endpoint, to me, in 2026, after decades of cloudslop.

      Its just a computer! on a shelf! you can go hold it!

      • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        That’s the server currently missing from the picture. Right now it’s a mess, because I’m doing a re-setup of everything. But getting my hands on hard drives have been difficult and I actually still need a CPU and motherboard.

        • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
          4·
          4 days ago

          I feel you. HD space (and everything else) is sooo expensive. I have an old spinning drive for my peertube instance just cause is easy to source.

        • northernlights@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          Lol puts “UPS” in brackets to suggest something janky, reveals it’s a battery power + solar power backup. Kudos :)

        • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          I want one! Ive been thinking of setting up one with solar since my area gets next to no rain and hot as hell. Might as well use that to my advantage!

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            3·
            5 days ago

            I’m still not using one. The problem is that you’ve got two classes of devices that haven’t quite converged to what I want.

            UPS

            Traditionally, the purpose of UPSes isn’t to keep systems running (other than through very short outages). It’s to do one of the following:

            • Provide a small amount of buffer until a backup power system, like a generator, has time to come online.

            • Give the systems time to shut down cleanly. If the user is right there, they have time to save their work. This was particularly an issue before journaled filesystems became the norm, since an unclean shutdown in the era when Windows was using FAT, Linux was using ext2, and MacOS was using HFS had at least the possibility to corrupt your filesystem. They have the ability to report their charge level to an attached computer so that it knows when the battery level is critical and then software on it can start it shutting down. On Linux, the most-common software package to do this is Network UPS Tools, or NUT.

            These things don’t need a lot of capacity. They rarely get drained, so they usually use lead-acid batteries, which are heavy and don’t have many full charge-discharge cycles in them (but are pretty happy staying fully charged all the time). You can still get these. The lead-acid batteries are replaceable, though, so an old UPS can keep going for a very long time.

            Powerstation

            These are designed to keep attached devices running for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, they have a couple of important limitations for powering computer systems.

            • They do not normally have the ability to report their charge level. Irritatingly, they do nearly always have a voltmeter rigged up to some software to map voltage to charge remaining to drive a ‘charge remaining’ display on the device, and there are USB HID device classes for reporting charge levels to a host OS, but for some reason, powerstation manufacturers don’t seem to have an interest in making a powerstation that has the latter functionality. NUT does have a USB HID backend, which means that it can monitor and shut down a system if they’d expose it. I’d really prefer the ability to treat one of these as a laptop-style battery, as Linux (as well as other OSes) have the ability to hibernate on low battery. On Linux, these show up as /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*, and there’s lots of software to display charge information and act based on low levels…but AFAICT from looking around the kernel, there is no way to get the kernel to deal with a USB HID device reporting remaining charge like this as a BAT device.

            • Computer power supplies can only smooth out so much of an interruption in their power. Computers rely on something on the order of a 10 millisecond transfer time after AC goes out until the UPS needs to be running full-tilt. searches ATX PSUs apparently are only required to operate for 16 milliseconds without power. Other hardware attached may or may not actually deal well with interruptions, but obviously the shorter the transfer time, the better. It looks like line-interactive UPSes tend to do something like 3-6 milliseconds. The problem is that a lot of powerstations have a transfer time in excess of this.

            There are some LFP UPSes now, but these have their own disadvantages. They tend to be fairly pricey, and the batteries are often not replaceable, which means that unlike the old lead-acid UPSes, when the battery dies (which will take longer than with a lead-acid battery), the whole device is also going to the landfill.

            And lastly, you have the problem that while lead-acid batteries are pretty mature and prices are pretty stable, LFP battery prices are coming down (and sodium-ion might start competing with them for fixed batteries). If batteries are cheaper in the future, waiting means a better deal.

            I don’t currently run a UPS on my systems (though I have in the past). I kind of decided that if I’m going to run a UPS, I’m probably going to just bite the bullet and use the combination of a traditional lead-acid UPS and an LFP powerstation, with the UPS plugged into the powerstation. In that configuration, the powerstation provides provides the longer-running power, and the UPS deals with short transfer time and warning computer systems that power is about to go out. This isn’t perfect, because (a) your computing devices can’t see the remaining charge on the powerstation in an outage (b) at some point, one still has to toss the LFP powerstation, and (c) there’s a little extra hardware involved. However, it also has a number of benefits:

            • Lead-acid UPSes pretty much always have replaceable batteries. One can keep the UPS around, though the batteries will have to be periodically replaced.

            • The UPS will provide time for the system to shut down.

            • UPSes are designed specifically for this, and have short transfer times. You don’t need to worry the way one might about a powerstation having marginal transfer time.

            • You can get a lot of AC-related functionality in UPSes, like online capability (which will clean up the power, if you want), which isn’t generally available in powerstations.

            • You can upgrade the “powerstation”, even (if you want) doing a build-your-own thing with separate cells and an inverter and charge controller (which is generally more cost-effective for larger systems) down the line. These discrete-component systems are also a lot easier to provide human monitoring of remaining charge, since you can pick the components (and worst case, all you need to do is connect a voltage sensor that can talk to a computer to it), though they don’t integrate as nicely off-the-shelf with something like NUT as do traditional UPSes.

            I’m not saying that this UPS+separate-battery-system is the only route to take, but I spent some time banging my head on it, and wanted to share if anyone else is similarly thinking about the same thing – that there may be a good argument to have a traditional UPS and some kind of separate battery system.